swineone

Congratulations to the author for such a detailed article.

However, I've lost trust on Time Machine the software and Time Capsule the hardware. For the former, in particular, I just grew tired of having to throw backups away every few weeks and restart from scratch after the dreaded error message I'm too lazy to Google for now -- and this is even if backing up to "new" hard drives that are very unlikely to be defective. I also had a huge scare after trying to restore from a Time Machine-backed up hard drive to a new M3 Max MacBook Pro and having many, many, many (dare I say the majority) of my files missing. I simply can't and won't ever trust Time Machine again after this episode.

Currently I'm using a mixture of Carbon Copy Cloner, a GUI interface to BorgBackup called Vorta, and Arq Backup. By the way, if you have "small" amounts of data, an external high-performance SSD is something I just cannot recommend enough. I'm using the Crucial X6 (which is not super-high-performance, as there are faster models at a small cost increase) and couldn't be happier with it. I believe the diversity between mechanical and solid-state drives also reduces the chance of losing all your backups.

mr. h said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

M68000 said:

So, now it’s bad to charge your phone to 100% ?  Lol,  so much different information out there.  It’s hard to know what to believe. 

Simple: ignore randombro69 on a forum and listen to the experts. We've detailed what you should and shouldn't do for iPhone battery health. My recommendation will always be "don't worry about it."

Really. This whole thing is getting silly. You can't beat physics.

And I would understand all the drama if battery replacements weren't readily available and cheap.

Who’s the expert here? You? Because your article is dead wrong. It has long been well established that charging lithium ion batteries beyond 80% accelerates the aging process. It’s not the charging per se; rather just being at that elevated state of charge. That’s why the optimised charging mode attempts to wait until the last moment to bring the battery to 100%: the theory is you will start using the phone soon after it reaches 100%, thus minimising the time the battery spends above 80%. However, in my experience the optimised charging is easily thrown off if the user has an inconsistent routine so I welcome this additional control provided by Apple.

I used to try to point this out in this forum, pointing out scientific sources to this source, but every time one of the site writers came here (probably the one from this article) and always claimed it was wrong, that it made no difference, etc. To him it doesn't matter that there are all these scientific papers; Apple itself ships devices half-charged; that it offered optimized battery charging; that it now offers this setting; that Apple offers a charge management feature since iOS 11 or 12, which detect when a device is connected to power all the time (like a kiosk) and automatically caps charging at 80%; that Samsung offers this setting as well; that RC battery chargers make the express same recommendation (and usually have a "storage mode" setting); that Tesla offers similar settings and guidance (avoid charging to 100% unless absolutely necessary) on their EVs; that e-bikes/e-scooters do the same thing; and so on and so forth. No, none of this matters, after all he's a "nuclear power electrician" and we should just believe that somehow makes him an expert on the completely distinct field of battery lifespan management. Really, the writing of the current article in particular shows how desperate he is getting: "yes, Apple added a setting; trust us, you shouldn't use it, you'll gain a few weeks". Which is false, with proper charge and heat management you can, very conservatively speaking, double the lifespan of your batteries.

Now onto some of the facts:
1. Some of us don't need, on a daily basis, the full 100% charge the phone provides. We have actual work to do and cell phones are generally just toys and, in an emergency, very poor replacements for an actual work machine like a Mac or PC. Or we always have a charger close by and could in practice keep the phone charging 95% of the time, and have no "range anxiety". I for one welcome this setting with open arms.
2. With regards to point 1, if people were to keep their phones charged 95% of the time at 100%, this would have definite effects on battery lifespan. On the other hand, with this setting, batteries could last much much longer.
3. When we do need the full charge, we can just toggle off the setting temporarily. Best of both worlds.
4. Heat is the #1 killer of batteries, especially combined with high state-of-charge. You have people who spend most of their day in a car, sometimes with the phone in direct sunlight, and charging to 100% all the time. I'm impressed that under such conditions a phone's battery would last a year. Now change that to charging to 80%, and suddenly the battery has a decent chance of lasting years.

Now onto the next fallacy: "just replace the battery, it's cheap". Here's a few other facts:

1. The world is not America. Where I live, changing an iPhone battery costs a significant portion of a month's minimum wage. I of course make more than the minimum wage, but it is proportionately expensive to myself. And pray you have an Apple store or an Apple authorized repair shop where you live; I live in a city of ~500,000 people and there wasn't one here until a few years ago. In my whole country, one of the largest on earth, with over 200 million people, there are only 2 Apple stores. 90% of the country is hundreds of miles away from the nearest Apple store. In fact a large percentage of the country is over 1,000 miles away from the nearest Apple store.
2. This leads people (even in America) to change batteries on unauthorized resellers in these phone-fixing kiosks you now find everywhere. Since Apple doesn't sell the batteries they use to the public (including these kiosks), you're taking a gamble on the lowest-bidder type battery, with awful performance and even risk of swelling and explosion.
3. Apple loves to claim how they're eco-friendly and so on. Well guess what's better than recycling a battery? Not swapping a battery at all! But of course in that case there's no money to be made swapping the battery or, even more convenient to Apple, swapping the device as a whole for a brand new iPhone.
4. To finish off, Apple may just plain refuse to swap the battery for you. I have a personal experience with this, on a 10.5" iPad Pro. The battery has been severely degraded, both as indicated by Coconut Battery, and from monitoring runtimes (much, much less than when it was new). I was in Abu Dhabi this year and took it to the Apple store in Yas Mall, asking them to change the battery for the price quoted on the website (459 AED, about US$ 125). Their reply, later confirmed by a call to the UAE Apple call center: "it's impossible to change the battery on an iPad, so we have to change the whole device and we charge much more [over 1200 AED as I recall] -- unless our [opaque] diagnostics claim that it reached the magical <80% threshold, in which case we'll replace it for 459 AED". Well now they run this opaque diagnostic and voilà, like magic, it claims my battery is at 90%, which disagrees with both Coconut Battery (which claimed <70%) and my actual experience. For all I know this opaque diagnostic software just outputs a random number over 85% to ensure they never agree to letting you pay the 459 AED price. Never mind that this information isn't given on this page or anywhere else. So you buy an iPad, safe in the knowledge that whenever you're not happy with how long a charge lasts, you can just pay 459 AED to replace it. Then when you go exercise this "right" you thought you had, suddenly it's 1200 AED price. Really slimy tactics from Apple.
5. By the way, a battery for the 10.5" iPad Pro costs US$ 25 at iFixIt. I'm pretty sure they sell decent batteries, although I'd rather have the Apple original one. And that's retail price, from a company that buys them in small quantities -- compare to Apple buying at gargantuan quantities with tailormade purchase contracts. So it's pretty clear that Apple is making a decent amount of cash on these battery replacements. And also, the claim by the Apple store that "it's impossible to replace the iPad battery" is blatantly false: iFixIt has a guide showing how to do it, and I've asked many of these phone-fixing kiosks and they will swap it if I want. In the end I just went with a new iPad (see, Apple's strategy of planned obsolescence worked perfectly with me) and will sell the old one to someone who will just swap it for a lowest-bidder battery and risk setting fire to their house. Oh well, at least it's their house, not mine.

DAalseth said:

swineone said:

AppleInsider said:

The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.

…a mobile phone battery would easily last as long as an EV battery, rather than forcing you to swap the battery after a couple of years

Where are you getting that? My wife and I have always gotten at least four years out of our battery. My current iP11 is about three years old now and Battery Health says it’s still at 85% capacity. I expect to get at least one, if not two more years out of it. This despite my not knowing the “right” way to care for it before the AI article earlier this year. I charged it when about flat, and unplugged it when full. 

Congratulations on getting such a long life out of your battery, but from my experience with other iPhone users who come talk to me about it, particularly those with a heavier use profile, 2 years is about the time they start complaining about "range anxiety," i.e. they fear the phone won't last until the end of day, they'll charge it in the car, perhaps take a power bank with them, etc. Inevitably, when looking up their battery health information, they're inching towards the magical 80% figure. Perhaps you're just not as much of a heavy user as the people I know.

Concretely, there's the case of my wife's iPhone 12, which belonged to me until the start of this year when I got an iPhone 13. While it was in my possession, I did some moderate babysitting of its battery (I've since improved the process further with my 13). Despite that, after less than a year in her hands -- with no further battery babysitting, since she's not as OCD as I am about it --  I just checked and her phone's at 89% health already. She's already starting to manifest the aforementioned "range anxiety." Quite likely I'll have to upgrade to a 14 or 15 next year so she can have my 13 with a minimally degraded battery (due to me babysitting said battery), since I won't spend good money replacing the battery of 3-year old hardware. Boom, Apple makes a sale due to their designed-in planned obsolescence.

If there was an app so that I could set the charge limit to, say, 70% and tell her to keep it plugged in while at her desk, her phone would easily last 6 years, probably more. I won't tell her to keep it plugged in without a charge limit, especially in the summer, since that destroys the battery even more than letting it drain (batteries absolutely hate the combination of high SoC and high temperature, and degrade quickly in those conditions).

Mike Wuerthele said:

swineone said:

AppleInsider said:

The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.

Until and unless Apple provides a blessed API call and approves an app that allows you full control over battery charging, then yes, planned obsolescence is a very real, concrete and provable thing. No, the non-working (and half-useless even if it worked) “Optimized Battery Charging” feature is not it. It is In fact the proof that Apple designs planned obsolescence into all of their hardware save Macs, since the technical capability for controlling charging exists but they won’t let the owner control it as they please.

If users were given that capability and followed a few simple battery care steps (plug phone in whenever possible while limiting battery SoC, do not expose to high heat, do not fast charge) then a mobile phone battery would easily last as long as an EV battery, rather than forcing you to swap the battery after a couple of years — which, at this point, is only marginally cheaper than upgrading, and thus people make the rational choice of upgrading; ergo, planned obsolescence.

They absolutely would not. The volume difference between the two batteries alone and how that differs on a chemical and physics basis would prevent that.

A battery replacement is between $50 and $100 on an iPhone. A new device is at a minimum $500. This is still not "planned obsolescence." Batteries die. It is a fact of physics and life.

They would, and I have the data from my personal devices to prove it (Coconut Battery history of battery health data). Batteries do die, but they do not need to die in a couple of years; EVs are proof of that.

AppleInsider said:

The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.

Until and unless Apple provides a blessed API call and approves an app that allows you full control over battery charging, then yes, planned obsolescence is a very real, concrete and provable thing. No, the non-working (and half-useless even if it worked) “Optimized Battery Charging” feature is not it. It is In fact the proof that Apple designs planned obsolescence into all of their hardware save Macs, since the technical capability for controlling charging exists but they won’t let the owner control it as they please.

If users were given that capability and followed a few simple battery care steps (plug phone in whenever possible while limiting battery SoC, do not expose to high heat, do not fast charge) then a mobile phone battery would easily last as long as an EV battery, rather than forcing you to swap the battery after a couple of years — which, at this point, is only marginally cheaper than upgrading, and thus people make the rational choice of upgrading; ergo, planned obsolescence.